


And Here I’ve Loved Rivers All This Time

by Doyle



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-15
Updated: 2009-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-02 20:09:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Doyle/pseuds/Doyle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'A bird had flown into my windowpane. I think I was trying to bring it back to life.' Illyria brings home a gift.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Here I’ve Loved Rivers All This Time

**Author's Note:**

> Some time after Origin and The Girl In Question.

Illyria presents the boy to him with a curve on her lips that says she is terribly pleased with herself, and Wesley remembers why he has never liked cats. She has brought him gifts of books, prophecies he always thought were myth; she has brought him Gunn, rescued from suburban hell; now she has brought him Connor.

If he thought the god-king of the primordium would take counsel from an unworthy human, he would tell her that this can't end well. If it's only cruelty, revenge for forbidding her Fred's appearance, then she must know he doesn't care enough to be hurt by this.

They both look at him, expectant, and he doesn't know why she's decided to bring him favours, why Connor is here, why either of them think he has anything they want.

"I'd offer you a drink," he says, the bottle and glass too easily at hand, "but you're underage, aren't you?"

Connor inclines his head, the gesture both alien and utterly familiar, and the overlapping memories are already giving Wesley a migraine. "Yeah. And you've said that to me before."

He listens for differences in the accent. There's a tiny variation, perhaps; shift in cadence, diminishing of the taut, confused anger that he always seemed to hear in Connor's voice. Takes a mouthful of the whiskey and says, "I have, haven't I? That summer." No need to specify which. Justine in her cage, Angel under the sea; Lilah's clever smile and Connor's awkward advances, switching between violence and shyness faster than Wesley could keep up.

And he remembers, at the same time, that summer, Lilah, the girl in his closet, the nights at sea, and Connor not there.

"The timelines shift around you both. They fracture and remerge, dividing like patterns of frost."

One day he'll stop hearing Fred when Illyria speaks, won't have her in the back of his mind wondering whether time looks like a kaleidoscope, like the northern lights. She would have wanted to know, he thinks.

Illyria says, "The boy desires you. And I."

Ridiculous twin urges, to correct her grammar and remind Connor he was once as blunt himself - the boy is looking at the carpet, blushing, and Wesley watches his fingers curl to fists and thinks _Angel, did you think you could fix him, give him a mum and dad and a student card and a new haircut and expect him to change?_

"Why are you here?" he asks, stepping towards him, and he touches Connor's cheek and remembers blood on his hands, blood on a sky-blue blanket.

Miserable shake of the head. "I don't know. I want to know… I kind of remember who I was. But I'm not him. Am I?"

He looks over Connor's shoulder to where Illyria is watching. Always watching him. "No," he says. "We're none of us who we were."

But when Connor's the first of them to break, pulling him down, hard and unpractised and exactly as he was that summer, and he lets it all happen again, not saying _stop_ even when Illyria's hair and eyes turn brown, reaching for him with the blue leeching away from her skin, he thinks that they're none of them so very different, after all.


End file.
